Tag Archives: chiptunes

I’m super stoked to be playing this show with Orange Drink and Swamptalk this weekend in Manhattan at Babycastles. If you’re in the area, come check this out. Pulsewave knows how to put on events. There’s going to be a chiptune open mic before the bands, and rad visuals by Claire Kwong!

Over the past few months I noticed things being moved around at night when I wasn’t at the studio. I set up some security cameras and what I captured is pretty shocking!

I created all of the music and video in Ubuntu Linux 16.04LTS. The music sequence was composed in LMMS then exported stems to Mixbus 3.6 where I mixed it and recorded the drums. I mastered the track in Audacity and edited the video in Kdenlive.

MANIFESTO

As time proceeds through the modern age, past once futuristic milestones like the turn of the millennium, and dates of apocalyptic prophecy, we look back on the years that have passed and wonder where they leave us. Neither shiny, idyllic utopias nor grim post-collapses have truly materialized, so we wonder now what future we have left to expect. What tale of tomorrow is left to be told by a world that should already be there?

Existing works of media, common purveyors of what may arrive next, are themselves couched in their own respective timeframes. Due to specific technological tools, or in-vogue stylistic techniques, most creative works telegraph the era in which they were made, even when depicting a hypothetical future. These means and methodologies were typically discarded when the next big thing came around (arguably, before their potential could be fully explored), further entrenching the identifiability of when something was produced.

More recently, this trend has started to reverse. The rapid advancement of easily available tools, along with anachronism itself becoming a motif, has lead to imitations of the past becoming common-place. This, combined with the Internet’s ability to preserve, catalog, and analyze our memories, has led to a sort of temporal compression of culture. The content of creative works has begun to disassociate from the context in which they were originally formed.

Rather than fight against this phenomenon, it is time to embrace it. Treating the past as off-limits makes little sense, as it has begun to act not just as inspiration, but more like its own type of material. By combining, retooling, and synthesizing these elements, a better understanding of time may arise.

I made another song in MilkyTracker, then recorded some drums to it. I created most of the samples in this one directly in MilkyTracker. I’m really happy with this one, especially the drum sound.

I only had 4 inputs for drums so I miked up the kick, snare, a single overhead, then used a behringer line mixer to run two dynamic mics to one channel for toms. In the mix I painstakingly cut every single rack tom and floor tom hit and put them into their own channel so I could pan them separately. With the single overhead, I duplicated it, changed the eq on the copy and offset it slightly with the original, then panned them LR to give it a pseudo stereo image.

This is actually the second version of this video I made, the first one had some lag in the transitions, so I redid the whole vid in Sony Vegas and it came out much smoother.

Dr. Zilog and friends made this infomercial type promo vid for his upcoming cassette and it’s pretty damn hilarious. This lead me to checking out his music, and I love it. So check it out. If you wanna hear some of Zilog’s chippy stylings, see below!